For better or worse, I finally have a PC with UEFI and a GPT disk. When I boot BIBM media, it offers to install BIBM on the hard disk. Attempting to do so would be, at best, useless or, at worst, possibly harmful, right? I think I know the answer, but that's still a question.

I can tell you I am was able to image using IFL and actually did a
restore of Win 10 just over a month ago.
Mary

On 5/7/2017 4:17 PM, Bob Coleman wrote:
> For better or worse, I finally have a PC with UEFI and a GPT disk. When I boot BIBM media, it offers to install BIBM on the hard disk. Attempting to do so would be, at best, useless or, at worst, possibly harmful, right? I think I know the answer, but that's still a question.
>
>

wrote:
> For better or worse, I finally have a PC with UEFI and a GPT disk. When
> I boot BIBM media, it offers to install >BIBM on the hard disk.
> Attempting to do so would be, at best, useless or, at worst, possibly
> harmful, right? I >think I know the answer, but that's still a question.

I believe that you can use the 'Partition work' part of BIBM on GPT disks,
but not the boot manager part, so there is no point in trying to install
it. 'Partition work' is also in IFL (if you have the BIBM product key), so
you can do the partition work functions from there as well.

> I believe that you can use the 'Partition work' part of BIBM on GPT disks,> but not the boot manager part, so there is no point in trying to install> it. 'Partition work' is also in IFL (if you have the BIBM product key), so> you can do the partition work functions from there as well.

Yes, I thought all of that also. I was/am mildly curious what would happen if one did try to install it, but I think not curious enough to try it and suffer the possible results.

It would be interesting to know why TerabyteUtilities has not changed BIIBM to be able to take advantage of the GPT/UEFI boot process. Other multi booting systems/capabilities exist, but none seem to be to the same extent and function that BIBM has previously created.

I would not try to install BIBM. While GPT disks have a "fake" MBR partition table, BIBM may assume it is real and would attempt to convert it into an EMBR. This might cause serious problems. Again, I am surprised that Terabyte has not responded to your question.

If you really want to install BIIBM, abandon UEFI and run in legacy mode, and convert your disk to MBR, or better yet, add an additional MBR drive to your system. A USB or SD card may also work.

tas3086 wrote:> I would not try to install BIBM. While GPT disks have a "fake"> MBR partition table, BIBM may assume it is real and would attempt to> convert it into an EMBR. This might cause serious problems.

My Lenovo laptop has a 128 GB NVMe SSD and a 1 TB SATA SSD (originally this was a 1 TB HDD, but I replaced it). The SATA SSD is formatted as MBR, with BIBM installed for multibooting and imaging purposes. The NVMe SSD is formatted as GPT. BIBM correctly recognises the nature of each disk (MBR and GPT).

The reason why I keep the NVMe SSD as GPT is related to updating the BIOS on the Lenovo. The tool that Lenovo supply to update the BIOS operates only on Windows installed on a GPT disk running in UEFI mode. So I keep the original Windows 10 pre-load on the NVMe SSD so that I can boot it via the Lenovo BIOS (cannot boot it using BIBM), and then update the laptop BIOS. One quirk: when booting an OS on the SATA SSD (MBR), it is not possible to stop the booted operating system from seeing the contents of the GPT disk -- BIBM always fills in the boot item with the GPT entry.

If I make a full disk backup of the GPT disk, attempt to convert it to EMBR, and somehow end up with an unbootable mess, can I have reasonable confidence that restoring the full disk backup would restore the disk to its working GPT state?

Yes. Making a backup before converting is recommended. You can use the TBOSDT chgdtype.tbs script to convert the disk between the different types or you can do the conversion manually. The following KB articles have more information: